Four and Twenty Blackbirds

Ardis nodded, and picked up a slice of cheese, nibbling it delicately. 'If he's doing this within line-of-sight, as I think he must be, he's either in the crowd or above it, which means he's either very good at getting himself into other peoples' homes or businesses and up to a second story, or he's climbing about on roofs.' She finished the cheese and started as a knot popped in the fire. 'If I were in his place, I'd offer myself as a cheap roof-repair service; after a snowfall followed by a day of sun, roofs are always leaking.'

Tal felt a rising excitement.Now we're getting somewhere ! 'We could see if there was anyone having his roof repaired at the last site,' Tal offered.

'That's a start,' Ardis said, brightening a little. 'We could also check with all the business-owners down by the docks, and find out if there were any strangers working around their buildings at the time.'

Workers; it wouldn't necessarily have to be workers.'People who claimed they were inspectors, maybe, or surveyors—' Tal put in, as Kayne scribbled madly. 'Or extra workers they can't account for —'

'Checking inns for strangers—' Kayne began, catching the excitement, then shook her head. 'Impractical, and besides, an inn isn't the only place a stranger to Kingsford might lodge. Good heavens, he could evenrent a place, and with all the disrupted neighborhoods, he might not be recognized as a stranger.'

For a moment, there was silence as they ran out of ideas. 'There's another reason why he must have considerable resources,' Tal put in. 'The daggers. We already know that there was more than one, and the second one was jeweled, decorated well enough that a well-dressed man did not look out of place carrying it. He either had to buy or make them, and I don't expect that sort of blade is the kind of thing you could pick up at an arms shop.' He gave Ardis a sidelong glance, to see if she admitted that the daggers were what he thought they were.

Ardis's face darkened for a moment at that reminder, and she finally shook her head and put down her tea. 'Perhaps not as rare as one would think, since this is a city recovering from a great fire, and trading an heirloom dagger for a cook-stove or some wood would not be out of place when hunger and cold tap on one's shoulder. I also dislike saying it, after how helpful the Haspur was, but a Haspur's—or most bird's—vision would be good enough that if this killer is seeing the murder scenes from above, perhaps he is also, somehow, seeing through the eyes of birds and is nowhere near the murder site itself.' Tal nodded grimly, and Kayne looked bewildered despite her best attempts to appear matter-of-fact. Ardis continued. 'I think we are looking for someone who has a grudge against the Church as well,' she said to Kayne with some reluctance. 'Tal and I have touched on this before. Perhaps even a defrocked Priest. I cannot imagine why anyone else would be using an ecclesiastical dagger.'

'Probablya defrocked Priest,' Kayne snapped, then colored. She must have been thinking the same thing after seeing Visyr's description of the murder-weapon. 'Forgive me, Ardis; I know this is probably the last thing you want to hear, but I'm only a novice and I don't have the—' she searched for words '—the emotional investment in the Church that you have. Maybe I can see things more clearly because of that. There just aren't that many lay people who know about ecclesiastical daggers!'

Ardis sighed, and covered her face with one hand for a moment. 'Perhaps you are right,' she murmured from behind that shelter. 'It must be said, or we won't consider it seriously. Write it down, Kayne, write it down. I don't want to cost people their lives because I don't happen to like the trend the investigation is taking.'

'It might not be a Priest at all,' Tal pointed out, hoping to spare her some distress by giving her other options to consider. Now that she had made the effort to include this one, she would be honest enough to pursue it to whatever end it led to. 'It could be someone who, like those would-be constables, is trying to emulate a Priest in some way. It could simply be someone who wants to make the Church out to be a villain.'

Ardis removed her hand and looked up at him. 'There is no one who wishes to make the Church out to be a villain so much as someone who has been cast out of the Brotherhood,' Ardis said slowly. 'And Kayne is right; the number of laymen who know about the ecclesiastical daggers is very low; the ceremonies in which they are used are so seldom performed publicly that it is vanishingly unlikely our particular miscreant could have seen one of them.'

An uncomfortable silence reigned, and it was Tal who interrupted it by clearing his throat. 'If— if—it is a Priest, or a defrocked Priest, it probably isn't anyone you know,' he pointed out lamely. 'After all, the murders didn't start here; Kingsford is only the last link in a path that goes out past Burdon Heath. I don't actually know where it started; Rinholm was just the last place I got an answer from.'

'And it could be that it isn't a defrocked Priest,' Kayne admitted after a moment. 'I can think of another enemy of the Brotherhood who would know about the daggers. It could be someone who was sentenced to lifelong penal servitude and excommunication by a Justiciar. Youdo have the dagger on view at the sentencing of those you are casting out of the Church, Ardis, and you use it very prominently when you symbolically cut all ties to the community of God and the fellowship of man.' She made a few flamboyant and stylized flourishes, as if she was using a blade to cut something in the air. 'It's pretty theatrical, and I would imagine it would stick in someone's mind.'

'The ceremony of excommunication is performed on those whose acts are so heinous that the Church cannot forgive them, and sometimes they are people we nevertheless have to allow to live,' Ardis murmured aside to Tal. 'Granted, we don't do that often, but—'

'But when you do, it's on pretty hard cases,' Tal pointed out. 'That'swhere I saw it! A Justiciar was excommunicating a particularly nasty piece of work—he hadn't killed anyone, but—well, what he'd done to his own daughters was pretty foul. Caught in the act, no less, and the poor child no older than nine! The local sire had him castrated, and the Church excommunicated him, then they both bound him over into penal servitude, and hestill defied all of us. There's a hard case for you! I thought it was a mock-sacrifice of some kind.'

'Oh, we use the daggers there, too, in another rare ceremony,' Kayne said cheerfully. 'And it isn't a 'mock' sacrifice. It's a case where—well, never mind; the point is there is no way you would have seen that ceremony